Photographs of two men taken from over 11,000 hours of CCTV surveillance footage have been released. The photographs show the two men passing through immigration control at Gatwick airport, and then a day later the same men are captured on the streets of Salisbury carrying out reconnaissance of the house where the Skripals were staying. According to British security services the men were using the aliases Alexander Petrov and Rusian Boshirov.

The British government have also released photographs of the perfume dispenser bottle used to store and apply the Novichok poison to the door handles of the Skripal residence. It was concealed in a counterfeit copy of a Nina Ricci Premier Jour brand bottle which was discarded inside its packaging into a charity donation bin near a park in central Salisbury.

Mr Charlie Rowley a local resident of nearby Amesbury subsequently retrieved the package and took it home. Both he and a female friend Dawn Sturgess became contaminated with Novichok while handling the perfume dispenser. Ms Sturgess subsequently died of acute Novichok poisoning, while Mr Rowley was recently re-admitted to hospital with symptoms of multiple organ failure.

British security chiefs believe the two suspects are serving members of the GRU (Гла́вное разве́дывательное управле́ние) which is a military intelligence service run by the armed forces of Russia under the direct control of their military Chiefs of staff and the Russian Defence minister.

Re: Novichok Poisoners Were Russian Intelligence Agents

An investigation by the citizen journalist website Bellingcat has uncovered the real identity of one of the suspects in the Skripal poisoning case and confirmed that the man is a known Russian GRU operative.

The man identified by British intelligence who travelled to UK on a Russian passport with the name Ruslan Boshirov is in reality Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated GRU officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award, Hero of the Russian Federation which he received in 2014 (most likely from Putin himself).

He was born in 1979 in the Amur Oblast area of Russia, near the China border, attended military college and then became an elite Spetsnaz officer in the 14th Brigade based in Khabarovsk. He was deployed to the Chechen war at least three times, winning twenty military decorations.

Sometime between 2003 and 2010 Colonel Chepiga was issued with a new identity and passport in the name of Ruslan Boshirov, by which time he is believed to have graduated from the GRU training academy known as the Military Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.